12.30.2005

While I've gotten to see my main core of friends from high school, and even got to see some people who I never really considered friends at a deal hosted by my high school itself, I have still yet to see some people I would have expected would have at least called me up or some such. Even my friends who weren't here for very long at least talked to me on the phone for a bit before they whooshed off to wherever they were going.

I guess just becuase you went to school with someone for 6 years or so and spent lots of time with them doesn't mean they're going to remember you exsist once everyone's off to college. Just remember that when you go to see your old high school or even college friends years later, they're not required to remember you, so don't get upset.

Never ever ever leave your wallet sitting out. Even at your aunt's house among family, your uncle or your cousin will steal the money you got for Christmas and any other money that happens to be in your wallet (let's say 95.00$ total). Failure to do so will make the money dissapear forever and make you look stupid at the store when you go to buy something and you find your wallet empty.

12.25.2005

This morning my family and my mom's side of my extended family had your basic Christmas present session. We all watched and laughed as my nephew deleriously ran back and forth between his new car thing and his new tent/fort/playset deal. There wasn't enough room for both though, so we had to take down the tent/fort, that way he could drive his car around the floor and the rest of us could walk anywhere. (Couldn't upload the rest of the images, silly Flickr upload limit on free accounts.. hehe).

Meanwhile, on the internet. A certain website does not yet exsist, due to some unknown difficulty with my partner getting the website hosted. I shall try to contact him soon as I can to get this fixed, as I would love for people to be able to see all our (read my) hard work.

12.24.2005

12.23.2005

So we made it to NC, nonstop. It's great here once I got to crash on the couch after the crazy-long trip. Now I'm typing this thanks to the magic of unencrypted wireless networks. I'm in my aunt's living room and there's like 3 networks I can get to without having to do anything but click on the name of the network. My relatives don't realize how much I have heard/researched about such things as wireless networks, so they think the neighbors are going to come knock on the door soon. Heh, if they don't know enough to put some basic WEP or even change the name of the AP to something other than the default linksys, then they won't know enough to come looking for me. :)

12.22.2005

In less than 2 hours or so, I will embark on a 24-hour drive to my mom's side of the family in North Carolina. We used to do this trip almost once every year, but that was then, and now we shall attempt it without dad. My sister can't even come because her new job won't let her have some time off, so it will be just my nephew, my brother, my mom, and me. I think we're ready and stuff, but if you don't see a new post here for like 2 days, you should probably ask somebody what's up.

Oh yes, and for those who I won't see before then: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Yeah that's right, I said it. Christmas. None of that Happy Holidays bushiness.

12.21.2005

So if my partner keeps his end of the deal, TheBlook.org will be up on Christmas. It will be fully functional shortly after and you're all welcome to enjoy and tell your folks. Only real things holding me back from finishing it all up is not having the hosting server yet and being a terrible designer. It looks fairly clean now, but I'd like for it to have some more color to it and not look quite as plain. If anyone wants to help out for a part in the project, I'd love it and you could email me at goodwinlabs@gmail.com and we can talk.

12.17.2005

So I made it home on Thursday this week at about 6:00pm (central time now). Had to go to Chik-fil-a for something to eat since all I had all day was a single pop-tart. Chik-fil-a is always good, so this time was no different. Then soon as I got home I got sucked right back into the life I left behind to go off to college. This, of course, consists of watching my nephew, doing chores, and getting to check my email like once or twice daily. Now I'm at my friend's house like we tend to, he's got a new xbox360 to play with and such, which I will go proceed to enjoy. You all enjoy your winter breaks and/or winter seasons. :)

12.14.2005

So my Earth Science Final this morning took a whole 25 minutes to complete and return to the dorms. I am now officially finished with all of my first semester at the Colorado School of Mines here. No more work till mid-Janurary.

I'm so very glad I won't have to take Epics or Earth Science ever again. Earth Science consists of memorizing boring things about the Earth's crust and the environment, and then goes off into all kinds of theoretical bullcrap about the beginning of the universe and the Earth itself. Why does anyone care at all about how the universe was formed? Sure, learning about our History can be helpful in learning about current day people and making guesses about the future, but that's only useful when you're talking history as in the 1400's or something. 4 billion years ago (if, in fact, the earth is anywhere near that old) offers nothing about today. You, your children, and the next 100 generations after them will all be dead long before the universe collapses in on itself or whatever crap people think is going to happen. I also like how theories like black holes and such come with excuses for not being able to prove it built into their definitions. I'll believe all that mess when I see some video tape of the first stars forming, or some photos of a black hole, heh. Heck, if someone wants to take me up in a spaceship and go see one, I'd be up for it.

12.13.2005

So I thought I'd google for myself to see if this blog could be found by people looking for things related to me on google. Google for things like "Ryan Goodwin" and you'll find stuff I went to looong long time ago mixed in with lots of things that have nothing to do with me. Search for something like "Samuel 'Artoo' Goodwin" and you'll find some things about me, like this blog, and then various Star Wars type things that mention people named Samuel on the same site. "Goodwinlabs" however gets you a few pages of things that are almost all me (such as my flickr account, my del.icio.us account and so forth) except for one that looks weird. "Freshman 15" gets you lots of junk about losing weight in college and nothing about this blog for pages and pages. Maybe I should change the blog's name to somehting involving goodwinlabs, as that seems to be much less common and would more likely bring people here if they were looking. I should probably buy up goodwinlabs.com and such before some squater grabs them from under me. Goodwinlabs was the name I used on my original website hosted on my friend's server before he reformated it and didn't feel like setting the web server back up. It had all my cg works in progress and finished products in a nifty basic html page. The biggest part of the site I was proud of was the image map I used for the main page. Too bad that image doesn't exists anymore, I took lots of time to make it. With M$ Paint, mind you.

12.12.2005

So my little brother was telling me about some kid he goes to school with (he's a freshman in high school) that has his own web design company or some such. Little did I know, he was serious. This kid has some space downtown back home with servers to host websites on and whatnot. His website looks quite nice actually, all clean and professional like. The kid has some clients he hosts and/or designs for and he's going to let my little brother work with him. My little brother knows hardly anything about websites right now, but we shall see how he grows and learns. He's trying to get money to buy himself a nice computer, since right now he's got the old pentium III I left him when I went off to college, hehe. So yeah, hope he does well. The kid's sites don't have much of a back end it looks like, so maybe he needs someone who can code the depth into websites... *cough* me * cough*. We all need money, and drumming up buisiness for this guy shouldn't be hard. So if you're reading this and thinking "gee, I wish I had a website," then you're in luck, cause I happen to know a guy who knows a guy who can hook you up for much cheaper than most people.

On a side note, I can now type with decent accuracy without looking at the keyboard. I still hunt and peck, but I'm a seasoned hunt and peck-er, so it looks good still.

12.10.2005

So the school provides me with a speedy internet connection, and back home we have dsl which ain't shabby either. These two facts explain why I don't watch much actual television (although I would like to record tv off the free cable we get in the dorms, but other things have higher priorities). There's all sorts of free video available to anyone who's got the speed or patience to download them. Here's a few I discovered today that I quite enjoy:

So when you get a basic windows install, you usually get some random card games and minesweeper and whatnot. There's none of that on an apple. My computer came with some random 3d game to show off that the laptop can handle 3d applications/graphics and chess. After amusing myself for a while with the 3d game (Nanosaur 2: The Hatchling), I went over to chess. When I opened up chess, the icon I remember as being the deal that shows wether or not the computer is listening to your voice shows up. Instantly I assume something interesting is buried in this newer version of chess (last time I played with chess, it was when the first OS X version was out and our computer lab back home had them) and looked in the preferences. This new version of Chess comes with the ability to talk to your computer as you play. It uses Apple's voice recognition to allow you to tell it what move you want to make. No more dragging peices around, you just say "Knight d3 to e5" or some such, and the computer knows what to do. Then, if you want, it will speak it's move back to you with whatever voice is set in your voice preferences. I like discovering new features in things I didn't know about. I don't remember anyone saying anything about the speech chess, but it's there and it's nifty.

So I just installed Front Row from Apple on my laptop. It didn't take long to do, and it's sweet. Now all I have to do is press buttons, and my laptop goes into media center mode. If you have a mac, you can do it too, just go here and follow the directions. I don't have much on the lappy yet, but what's on there works well. If you go into the movies section, it pulls a live list of trailors to watch in fullscreen too, I thought that was sweet in particular.

Meanwhile, no more classes, and no more assignments from lame classes like Earth Science and Epics. I'm so very glad that's over, cause I definitely don't want to do more of it. I turned in all the Earth labs I had left and completed all the Epics Papers we needed for our presentation today. Fortunately, we didn't win for our class, so we didn't have to go back later that day and stay for about 5 hours for the inter-class competitions. My roommate got second in his class, so he got to go and spend his evening being bored to tears waiting his turn. Silly him. So while he was gone, we went up to the ORC in Mines Park and watched movies on the big screen while the kids who had money left on their meal plans burned some of it for the rest of us. which reminds me, I have a drink to go grab and sip on.

12.07.2005

So today I got my ibook I have been waiting for. It's beautiful and I like it and stuff. I'm typing from it right now, actually. I will post screenshots and things in my flickr account once I get everything installed/setup like I like it. :)

If you look over to the side there, there's a deal displaying images from my flickr account. I uploaded everything I had on my computer, and should be uploading more soon and such. Most of what I had to start with is photos from graduation and lots my sister took of my nephew. So enjoy!

12.06.2005

So yeah, apparently the guy who came up with the whole idea of theblook.org has found himself a new job. He split the idea 50/50 with me if I would help him write the code necessary in the background for such a site, but now I'm a 75% owner since his new job means 10 hour days and lots of travel. I'm glad he's doing well, but meanwhile he was the one defining theblook's look and style, and he can't do that anymore. So I need me someone who can make things look prettier than I, otherwise I'm gonna do me all kinds of learning the hard way.

I'm really glad I did this podcast, and I'm surprised at how many people actually listen to it, and now I think I'm done. I've been wanting to do this since the summer when I discovered podcasting and started listening to them, and after trying it out, I don't think it's for me. The Freshman 15 will remain open as a blog, not weekly recordings. If like 5 of you emailed me and wanted me to read off my posts per week and record that, like if you don't want to read updates daily or like hearing me for some reason, I'd be willing to do that. Otherwise, stay tuned for plenty of entries about all kinds of things, mostly pertaining to college life here at Mines and stuff.